Time to talk

We talked about vacation plans. We talked about parent-teacher conferences. We talked about food allergies and orthodontia. We talked about the pros and cons of massage. We talked about iPhones and iPads. We talked about how to make risotto and how to dispute a property tax assessment.

With almost 48 hours, we had enough time to cover everything.

I feel so lucky to live in a small, closeknit community in which I have so many friends and acquaintances, but sometimes it seems every encounter is rushed. I run into local friends at school events, at the library, on the running path, in line at the post office….but so often there isn’t enough time for even a complete sentence, let alone a full conversation. And most of us have kids who are old enough now that we can’t blame them for the distraction: it’s not like in the playgroup days, when we couldn’t finish sentences because we were keeping our toddlers from scaling the bookshelf or rolling in a mud puddle. It’s just that we always have someplace else to be.

So when three friends and I planned our second annual springtime getaway weekend together, I counted on finally having time to finish some conversations, and start new ones.

It’s not that everything we discuss is so important. Far from it. Amy told us about her singing dentist. I described the calendar my grandparents had in their lakeside cottage. Recipes and book recommendations were exchanged.

But other conversations unspooled amidst the chatter as well: concerns about our children and parents; the fears and frustrations we encounter every day; ideas and hopes about our own futures.

It didn’t matter what we talked about. We had from Friday evening until Sunday afternoon, and it was enough. I arrived back home early Sunday evening with the rare feeling of, for once, not having left any conversations half-finished.

It’s the second consecutive year the four of us have taken this trip. We’ll plan to do it again next year. By then there will be so much more to talk about: matters trivial and profound, uplifting and discouraging. There always is. In the twelve months until then, a lot of conversations will once again go unfinished. Yes, getting away for 48 hours is a huge luxury – and so is having enough time to talk and talk and talk. But it’s enough to know, or even just to hope, that in another year we’ll do it all again.

Pre-holiday getaway

When we first broached the idea with friends about going away this weekend, I acknowledged that in some ways it seemed like not the best timing. “I know every weekend in December is really busy with parties, plus there’s always Christmas shopping or baking or decorating to do….” I said tentatively. “But do you think it might work out to go away the second weekend in December anyway?”

And in some ways, as the date approached, it continued to seem like a silly idea. After we’d agreed it could be fun to be in Portland instead of home this past weekend, party invitations started arriving via snail mail and email, and I realized we’d miss out on some key social events. I looked at my Christmas preparations list and saw how much still needed to be done – not just the inevitable gift-shopping but also the card-writing and candy-making and Christmas tree-purchasing. I wondered why we didn’t pick a wide-open weekend sometime amidst the tedium of late January instead.

But there was still a sneaking suspicion that this could be a great weekend to go away. And it was. Holiday spirit abounded in Portland, and the city glowed with glittery ornamentation in a way that our quiet suburban town just can’t match. We toured a Victorian mansion decorated for a Civil War-era Christmas; we shopped at bustling downtown stores as part of a Downtown Holiday Stroll, and we viewed an exhibit of gingerbread houses.

Then, inspired by all the clever gingerbread architecture we’d seen, the four kids in our group made their own gingerbread houses. After dinner, we strolled to the Old Port to see the colorful lights on the outsides of buildings downtown as well as the pretty wreaths and somewhat more discreet ornamentation on our neighbors’ doors.

Rather than pulling us away from the holiday spirit, going away actually seemed to add to it. But it wasn’t only because of all the festivities. If I had stayed home for the weekend, I would have done a lot of cooking and some housecleaning and a little bit of shopping. Instead, we did a lot of walking throughout the city, ate some wonderful food, learned a little bit of history at the Victorian mansion, and had a great visit with our guests. Since we didn’t have a lot on the schedule, the kids could take all the time they wanted decorating their gingerbread houses, and when they were done, there was still nowhere else we had to be, so they went outside to toss a football around.

I’ve often wished our holiday season involved a little bit more time for nature and reflection and a little bit less time going to parties and addressing Christmas cards. Yet I wouldn’t want to do without the parties and cards and other holiday minutiae altogether. They’re part of the season also. But being out of town gave me the opportunity to focus on some of the aspects of the season that I tend to neglect: time outdoors, quality time with friends.

On Friday night after dark, I stood out on the balcony looking at the full moon over Casco Bay, with the masts of sailboats lined with holiday lights twinkling from the harbor below. It was a new perspective on the holiday season. And just like the rest of the weekend, it made stepping out of our usual holiday-season routine for a couple of days seem like a wonderful idea.

24 hours in Portland with Holly

My eight-year-old and I did a quick 24-hour visit to Portland this past weekend. The weather was cold and drizzly, which was what prevented Tim from wanting to go with us, but Holly and I had a wonderful time together despite the weather.

My college roommate, along with the third of her four daughters – her 13-year-old – drove from their home 45 minutes south of Portland to join us for dinner. Although we usually see each other every summer, we’d missed last year’s usual get-together, so we had tons to catch up on. Her eldest daughter just completed her first year of college; her second daughter is wrapping up her first year of high school. She told me about attending her 25th high school reunion in Sanford, Maine. (“No, no one is impressed at all that I earned a Ph.D. No one there knows what a Ph.D. is.”) Even without milestones, we can chat for hours without drawing a breath; it was rewarding as always to just talk and talk.

As a big treat, Holly got to stay up late watching “High School Musical 3.” I caught up on email while she watched the movie; we both went to bed after 10. She slept Sunday morning until 9:30, which gave me more than two hours to sip freshly brewed coffee and read both the Boston Globe and the New York Times on my Kindle. It was one of the most lazy and enjoyable mornings I’ve had in months.

After breakfast, we painted our toenails. Yes, it’s a cliché thing to do on a mother-daughter weekend, but I had just bought a new pair of sandals that really require painted nails, and Holly assured me that she was the only third grader currently going au naturel in the nail department, so we both indulged in some Glittery Mauve.

And then we headed to the Old Port Festival. Several blocks of downtown Portland were blocked off from traffic for this annual event, and despite the drizzly chill, thousands of people showed up. We heard some good live music among the three stages set up around the neighborhood, and we saw people eating an amazing variety of deep fried foods off of paper plates (Holly being no exception, of course: fried dough sprinkled with powdered sugar for her, which actually seemed fairly conservative compared to the ubiquitous deep fried pickles being sold throughout the festival).

Eventually we needed to head home; Holly had plans to go swimming with a friend in the late afternoon, a thought I must admit I found reassuring as she slept ‘til 9:30 and I wondered how she was possibly going to fall asleep that night. Swimming is always good for tiring kids out. With just the two of us staying in the condo for only one night, it didn’t take long at all to clean up, and by 1:30 we were in the car heading south on the Turnpike.

Not everything worked out exactly as hoped this weekend. The weather was disappointingly chilly, and the forecast of rain kept us from bringing our bikes, which meant we couldn’t go for a ride together and also I couldn’t go running, since the plan was for Holly to ride alongside while I ran. But there was time for running when we got back to Carlisle, and all in all it was such an enjoyable weekend. Maybe Holly and I will look back and remember it as a really special time together; or maybe in the larger context it won’t seem unique, since we do spend time in Portland alone together once or twice a year when no one else is available to go with us.

But in a way, that was what was so special about it: the fact that nothing we did – the pedicures, the music festival, even the visit with my former roommate – was so unusual as to be inherently memorable. Unique or not, I’m just glad we went and had so much fun together. How it fits into the context of our memories with the passage of time is something we just don’t know, but the fact that we had a great time with each other this weekend is a certainty.

City stay

It was a plan three years in the making, though the actual scope of the plan certainly doesn’t merit taking that long to effect.

Three years ago, Rick and I agreed we’re really like to go into Boston for an overnight getaway: see a live theater performance, walk through the Back Bay neighborhood in which I lived during the years between college and marriage, absorb the ambience of city life that we expose ourselves to so little these days.

Boston is only 45 minutes from where we live, and leaving the house and kids behind for one night really isn’t that complicated an undertaking, so it shouldn’t have taken three years to pull this off. We’ve traveled for longer stints of time to far more distance places in those same three years.

But somehow the stars just never aligned: our schedule and our wishes and our budget never intersected at a point where this little trip seemed viable until this month.

And in the three years since we first imagined it, we’d made a critical change to the plan. Perhaps it has to do with my own growth process as a parent and perhaps it has to do with the difference between having kids age 5 and 9 versus having kids age 8 and 12, but at some point not long ago I decided I wanted Tim and Holly to come with us. “We need a family excursion more than we need an adult getaway right now,” I told Rick when we were finally ready to nail down a plan. “They haven’t had enough exposure to city life lately either. Let’s all do this together.”

So that’s what we did, and even though it was only 24 hours, it was a wonderful experience. We ate at Legal Sea Foods, visited the Museum of Fine Arts, saw a performance by Blue Man Group, swam in the hotel pool, and took a long walk through all our old haunts: past my Back Bay studio apartment, through Rick’s college neighborhood, into the Christian Science Center courtyard where we got engaged. “This is where I was conceived!” Tim exclaimed when Rick told him the stone bench amidst flowering gardens next to the famous fountain was the site of our engagement. “Not exactly!” I exclaimed, startled by his mistake. Conceived of, maybe, which is definitely different. But we let it go at that.

Tim thanked us for including him; Holly followed suit when she saw that we appreciated his words, even though I don’t think she had the same mature awareness that Tim did as far as understanding we could have just as easily gone by ourselves. And that was one thing I couldn’t help thinking was better about traveling with them now than when they were a lot younger: with little kids, you spend a lot of time trying to arrange family trips and hoping the kids appreciate it. At this point, we know they do. And they say so.

Perhaps it shouldn’t have taken us three years to execute on this plan, but I’d argue it was worth the wait. We all had a wonderful and memorable time. Simple enough to drive 45 minutes from home for a single overnight? Absolutely. But all the more appreciated for how long it took us to get there.